Warner Bros Discovery recently shut down a trio of game studios, including the well-regarded Monolith Productions. This has put one of the coolest game mechanics of the 2010s in limbo. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's excellent Nemesis system is locked behind a patent owned by Warner Bros all the way until 2036, according to reporting by Eurogamer. The Nemesis system was featured in both 2014's Shadow of Mordor and the follow-up Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Simply put, it's a gameplay mechanic in which enemies remember previous encounters with the protagonist.

That's the unofficial moniker of almost 100 women aged 19 to 64 who are volunteers in part-time military service in air defence units in the suburban community northwest of Kyiv. Each "Bucha witch" trains to handle assault rifles and machineguns to shoot down Russian drones that swarm above their homes several times a month. The weapons fly towards Kyiv to blow up buildings, prompting Ukrainian air defence forces to launch pricey Western-supplied missiles at them. The buzzing swarms repeat the route of Russian ground forces in early 2022 when they occupied most of the Bucha district for 33 days and committed atrocities, now well documented, that captured the world's attention. According to Ukrainian officials and international war crimes monitors, Russian fighters killed hundreds of civilians and robbed, raped and tortured thousands more.

Monolith Productions, the studio responsible for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel, is working on a new game in the Wonder Woman franchise. It features an original storyline where players will "become Diana of Themyscira in the fight to unite her Amazon family and the humans from the modern world," Monolith says. Publisher Warner Bros. Games showed off a teaser for the new project during The Game Awards. Wonder Woman is being billed as "a new third-person, open-world action-adventure" game, according to Monolith, and really, that's no surprise. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was a third-person action RPG with the Nemesis System, a clever orc-management mechanic, tacked on top of it.

Free Guy bills itself as a comedy, but it exists in a world in which Ryan Reynolds doesn't exist. Which, of course, makes it a tragedy. The movie solves this problem by building its own Ryan Reynolds out of code, inside a video game. But, Guy (Reynolds) is more than just a simple NPC. In truth, the emergence of Guy as a fully-fledged awareness inside the game wasn't wholly directed.

The Humble WB Games Classics Bundle offers exactly what you'd expect: The hits. The bundle offers some seriously great PC games from classic franchises like Batman, Mad Max, and Middle-earth, and better yet, they're available for a ludicrously low price--just $12 to unlock all seven games included in the bundle. But Humble lets you pay what you want for its bundles, giving a portion of the proceeds to charity, and even $1 will let you in on some action. The $1 tier unlocks Batman: Arkham Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year Edition, and Scribblenauts Unlimited. Paying more than the average donation--currently sitting at $4.12--gets you DC Comics brawler Injustice: Gods Among Us, the open world Mad Max adaptation, and Bastion, a breathtaking action RPG that topped many games of the year lists when it released.

In this post I present a Python script that automatically generates suggestions for startup names. You feed it a text corpus with a certain theme, e.g. a Celtic text, and it then outputs similar sounding suggestions. I applied the script to "normal" texts in English, German, and French, and then experimented with corpora of Celtic songs, Pokemon names, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Black Speech, the language of Mordor. I've made a few longer lists of sampled proposals available here. You can find the code, all the text corpora I've used, and some pre-computed models in my GitHub repo: Recently, an associate and I started to found a software company, but most name ideas we came up with were already in use. We wanted a name with a Celtic touch, and we needed a large number of candidates to find one that was still available.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor was excellent. While the combat and stealth gameplay was very Assassin's Creed -- just with some added ghostly powers -- Mordor had something truly unique: the nemesis system. Players would almost forget the main storyline as they were caught up battling with other Orcish leaders who had become sworn enemies. With Shadow of War, little has changed. Again, the nemesis system forms the most intriguing part of the game, offering more variety of Orc thanks to an increasingly diverse voice cast.

"Two rings to rule them all, two rings to find them, two rings to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." Thus opens Middle Earth: Shadow of War, or at least that's how it would open if there were any justice in the world. See, 2014's Shadow of Mordor ended with our half-ghost/half-man protagonist Talion née Celibrimbor [Three-year-old spoiler] defeating Sauron in hand-to-hand combat and announcing his intention to paradoxically forge a second One Ring. And he does just that to open up this bigger and better sequel. I've played the first six or so hours of Shadow of War ($60 on Amazon) so far--enough to reach Act 2 (of 4) and start dominating orcs.

Your perfect orc enemy (and ally) from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor are coming along for the ride in this fall's sequel, Shadow of War. Mordor has just gotten an update that adds the "Nemesis Forge" to the game that will import your personalized, highest-ranked orc captain and buddy into War once the game comes out October 10th. Nor will it simply read your game save and do its trick, so you need to have the old game laying around if you want Grishnak the Red to inhabit War. Meaning, if you traded Mordor in after beating it two years ago you'll need to buy it again to take advantage of the Nemesis Forge. Or, lucky for you, Warners Bros Interactive has made Mordor free to try this weekend on Steam and Xbox One.

A lot of time and effort will be spent discussing Middle Earth: Shadow of War's improved Nemesis System between now and probably about a month after release. And for good reason--the Nemesis System was the only thing that elevated predecessor Shadow of Mordor from another me-too Assassin's Creed clone into a technical wunderkind. Leaning into that aspect for the sequel is probably a good call, especially since we've failed to see similar tech make its way through the industry. The dynamic characters that made Shadow of Mordor such a joy are still, three years on, a novelty. But I had 20 to 30 minutes of hands-on time with Shadow of War during E3 and to be honest, the Nemesis System was the least of my concerns.